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Oldest "Oldest"

by Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

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about

The debut, limited-edition vinyl offering from New York's OLDEST, the duo of Mick Barr and Brooks Headley. Unlikely document of raw, blackened, avant-hardcore. Two lifers responsible boasting equally unlikely résumé that includes Born Against, Krallice, Universal Order Of Armageddon, Orthrelm, Men's Recovery Project, Crom-Tech, Wrangler Brutes, The Flying Luttenbachers, Skull Kontrol, Ocrilim, Octis, The Great Unraveling, Quix*O*Tic, (Young) Pioneers, etc. Conjuring the spirits of outsider heaviness pioneers like Darkthrone, Voivod, and Man Is The Bastard.

"One of Prison Tatt's favorite LPs.! Hard-as-brimstone, swinging-as-fuck black metal, with compositional twists, great playing and songwriting, and progressive arrangements that elevate this far above just another black metal record. Six monster epics, rough and raw and masterfully rendered. Our highest recommendation!"
- Wm. Berger, WFMU, Prison Tatt Records

"From our pal Mike at the amazing Sleeping Giant Glossolalia comes this latest blast of gnarled metallic guitar heavy whatthefuck from long time aQ fave Mick Barr (Krallice, Ocrilim, Octis, Orthrelm, Crom-Tech) who in Oldest, is teamed up with Brooks Headley (Born Against, Universal Order Of Armageddon), who besides being a rad drummer, is now a fairly well known pastry chef! However, as curious as we would be to hear/see Headley's pastries combined with Barr's axe-work, it is in his role as drummer, that he completes the Oldest duo, which Barr describes as sounding like Voivod meets Darkthrone, but which in fact sounds a lot like Barr's late great Crom-Tech combo. A wild mathy tech metal grindpunk noise-prog blowout that finds the duo unleashing frenzied stretches of tranced out guitars, frantic riffing, the melodies angular and atonal, the drumming dense and complex, the arrangements fractured and fucked up, the vocals a punkish shriek. Intricate and heavy, dizzying and chaotic, the songs super fluid, droney, cyclical and near static one second, lurching stop/start stutter the next, slipping occasionally into chugging classic metal mode or soaring blackened buzz, but always returning to that distinctive twisted technical grinding math/meth metal crush that Barr seems to have a lock on. Fucking awesome. And not even really out until next month, so for now, an aQ exclusive!" - aQuarius Records

"Shredding Voivodian sci fi thrash from this new duo of guitarist/singer Mick Barr and drummer Brooks Headley, who used to play in the political hardcore punk band Born Against as well as Universal Order Of Armageddon, Wrangler Brutes, Mens Recovery Project, and who's also a renowned pastry chef in NYC. I love this band - it's definitely influenced by black metal, but where Barr's other black metal influenced band Krallice sounds huge and majestic and dense, this is much more primitive and stripped down, citing Darkthrone as one of their main inspirations, but sounding like this weird fusion of Mick's old band Crom-Tech and the earlier pre-Nothingface Voivod stuff and archaic blackthrash.
Like you would expect, there's lots of the trebly tremolo shredding that Mick is known for, but he also whips out these awesome deformed riffs that are really skronky and dissonant, and can at times be very evocative of Piggy's guitar playing in Voivod. The drumming from Headley is fast and furious, usually galloping at thrash speeds, but also veering into extended pounding tribal rhythms and dizzying exercises in off-time angularity and the duo throw in abstract guitar noises, percussive scraping, and swells of thunderous war-drum pummel into their atonal thrash. Vocalwise, Mick's screeching is run through a massive wind tunnel style reverb that really smacks of old black metal and the lyrics are appropriately apocalyptic. It's possible that this might be my favorite band of Mick's so far. I love the stuff that he's been doing with Krallice and Ocrilim lately, but this album has been on the deck non-stop lately, and is totally sating my lust for weird, fucked-up thrash. It's frenzied, futuristic stuff with smatterings of the sort of intricate, ascendant melodies that Krallice is known for along with walls of Chatham-esque guitar drone, but even when Oldest is at their most epic, the album is still surrounded by a very cold, very ferocious vibe. Then there's the last track "Fertility Rituals", which is nearly devoid of Mick's skronky, dissonant shredding and instead delivers a KILLER blast of warped blackened thrash with spiraling leads that sounds a LOT like a blacker version of Killing Technology era Voivod. This disc rules."
- Crucial Blast


SGG - 019

credits

released March 12, 2010

Mick Barr: strings, vocal
Brooks Headley : drums

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